


What is a legacy? (It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see)

by Tricsha



Series: The other pensieve [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Family, Gen, legacy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:48:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24250852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tricsha/pseuds/Tricsha
Summary: There have been multiple disowned Blacks through the centuries. This is the legacies that seven of them had.
Relationships: Bob Hitchens/Iola Black Hitchens, Marius Black/Original Character(s)
Series: The other pensieve [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1750504
Kudos: 6





	What is a legacy? (It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see)

Looking after a family tree is hard work. It requires constant vigilance and pruning of the sick branches that threaten the rest of the tree. No one knew that better than the Blacks. They were always watching their tree like hawks. Cutting branches the second it was clear that it wouldn’t be possible to save it. 

Iola Black was cut of from the family when she announced her intention to marry Bob Hitchens, a muggle. She had known that it would happen and had already packed her things and hidden them at a friend’s house. Bob knew what to expect, she had told him the same day that he proposed. So she left Grimmauld Place for a new world that she barely knew. 

Adjusting to living like a muggle had been a long road full of mishaps and it wasn’t helped by her working in Diagon Alley and not among muggles. But the pay at Madam Malkin’s was better than anything she could get among muggles. And they would need the money once children came along. For they both knew that Bob’s job would not be enough to keep them all comfortable. So she kept trying and learning as life went on.

Four children there would be in the end. Joseph, Florence, Evelina and Edgar. Three of them they would send of to Hogwarts. Magic never bloomed in Evelina like it did in her siblings but that didn’t stop her from doing what she wanted with her life. And what Evelina wanted was to be a midwife. 

So that was what Iola would leave behind she thought. A legacy in the form of a cursebreaker, a healer, a midwife and ministry employee. But there would be a fifth person added to it as Phineas Black was cut from the tree in late 1904.

  
  
  
  


Phineas Black had always been a bit of an oddity among the Blacks and especially in comparison to his father. Phineas was a compassionate and fair person who always tried to treat people equally. When entering Hogwarts did he try and keep to himself as much as possible to avoid being nice to the wrong people. That plan failed when Ezra Goldstein decided that he wanted to be friends with him. When he found out that Ezra’s mum had been a muggleborn did he not have it in him break his best friends heart by ending their friendship. So instead he turned his focus on to making sure that the knowledge never reached his family.

He kept doing that once leaving Hogwarts and entering a position at the ministry. At that point had it extended to keeping things hidden from anyone that didn’t need to know. Yes, the new Healer-in-charge of the Balfour Blane ward is a muggleborn but that is none of Fredrick Bulstrode business so let’s talk about cousin Enoch’s newborn instead. He and Ivy settled on Walter for the lad, isn’t that right?

It all went well until that bill came up and Phineas couldn’t hold his tongue anymore. The bill based on Rappaport’s Law that wanted to make the marriage between magical people and muggles illegal. Already existing marriages would be tried on a case to case basis to see if they posed a threat to the Statute of Secrecy in which case the muggle spouse would be obliviated and sent back to the muggle world. The bill wasn’t expected to pass but Phineas had taken one look at Ezra and Lucy with little Levi and decided that he had to do everything in his power to make sure that the chance was zero.

The bill failed just like expected and Phineas was informed by his father that he was a disgrace to the family and that he was no son of his. Phineas packed his things and left the same evening. Ezra and Lucy took him in until he managed to get a flat of his own.

He had assumed that he would never speak with anyone from his family again after that. He ran into his sister in Diagon Alley on day and she acted as if he didn’t even exist, looking right past him at the books behind him. But then one day his colleague Edgar walked into work with a confused look on his face and informed him that his mother wanted to know if Phineas would be interested in joining them for Sunday Roast this week. And that was why Phineas a few days later found himself being told to come inside and have a seat by a woman who had an unsettling resemblance to his aunt Elladora. That was if aunt Elladora had been smiling instead of looking like everything in the world was awful. 

One Sunday roast would turn into many over the years to come. Phineas might have lost a family due to his actions but he had also gained a new one in the form of an aunt and an uncle, four cousins and their eight children. By the time he died would he be remembered just as much for being the Black who stood up for muggles as he would be remembered as one of Iola Hitchens’ bunch. That together with Marius Black would be his legacy.

  
  
  
  


The life and legacy of Marius Black could easily have been reduced to nothing more than the burnmark that had erased him from the tapestry had it not been for Belvina Burke and her decision to for once in her life choose her own path instead of the one everyone expected her to take.

Belvina knew that she wasn’t a particularly strong person. She preferred to let others make the decisions for her and simply follow along. She had chosen her husband by her own accord but that was just about it, even the names of her children had been something she had let her husband decide. But the one thing she would remember as her one true choice was the day when she decided to save her nephew from their family. She had suspected for many years that little Marius Black was a squib, as had the rest of the family. So when the time for when Hogwarts would send out their letters came around had she offered to take care of Marius for a few weeks. When the letters came and there was none for Marius had she summoned all the courage she required and for the first time in almost twenty years did she write to her brother asking him for help.

No one said anything when Marius didn’t return from the trip to Diagon Alley. Everyone knew or rather thought that they knew what Belvina had done with him. In reality had she nervously navigated through Muggle London from Diagon Alley to Soho Square with Marius’ right hand in a firm grip. “Don’t stare”, she had whispered to him as they both sat down on a bench. “Sorry auntie”, Marius had mumbled back as he watched all the muggles around him. “Bell, looks like life have been treating you well, and this must be Marius”. A man dressed in a dark blue suit and a fedora had walked up to the two. “Marius, this is your uncle Phineas. He will take care of you, keep you safe from the family”. Marius had nodded slowly before carefully take Phineas’ hand and followed him away from Soho Square, away from aunt Belvina, and away from life as he knew it.

Phineas first brought little Marius to Edgar and Laura in Camden. They were the only ones of the Hitchens that had children of an age close to Marius. Phineas couldn’t help but smile a little as he watched the boy battling with the curiosity of this new world and the belief that all of this was bellow him, unworthy and dirty.

It would take time for Marius to get used to it all, to Phineas’ flat in Golders Green, to the fact that no curses had been thrown when Irene brought her muggleborn girlfriend to the Sunday roast, to that none of the Hitchens owned a house-elf. Adapting to a world without magic had been the hardest of it all, even with the help of Evelina who would often show up in Golders Green or Camden when she wasn’t working. She would explain the finer things of the muggle world to him.

Marius was 28 when the Second World War broke out. He would spend most of it at Bletchley Park where he would meet the girl that he later married. Lucy Walker was a widow whose husband had drowned a few years earlier. They married just a few months after the war ended.

In the end had nothing really changed Marius’ legacy in the wizarding world. He was still just a burnmark on a tapestry. His legacy was found in the muggle world in the work he had done during the war, in all the children he taught after it and in his and Lucy’s five children.

  
  
  
  


Cedrella would be mostly forgotten by the world she left behind. She would be the Black who married a Weasley, one of those damn Weasley or possibly the lady in the tea shop among those that remembered the little shop in Diagon Alley that had closed in the 60s. If anyone had asked Cedrella herself what she considered her legacy had the answer been her family and most of all her many grandchildren. Cedrella died in her sleep, happy with the life she had lived and without any major regrets.

  
  
  
  


Andromeda had always assumed that her legacy would be her daughter and her job as a healer. Then came the second war against Voldermort and took away first her husband and then her daughter and son-in-law, leaving her with only her infant grandson. Teddy was three when she decided to move from the house she and Ted had bought together all those years ago. There was too much sadness connected to it. Teddy would instead grow up in Falmouth, close to the sea. She would send him of to Hogwarts and receive letters telling stories about all the things he and his friends got up to. She would beam with pride when he was named prefect and later Head Boy but in the back of her mind wish that her daughter had been there to see it. Teddy should have been Nymphadora’s legacy, not hers.

  
  
  
  


Alphard left a legacy in the form of the bugger of that was his will. He was one of few Blacks that had managed to be disowned posthumously. He had known that the rest of the family wouldn’t take kindly to his actions when he wrote his will. But it would be worth it. Sirius had been one of few good things left about the Black family and they had pushed him away. Bugger all of them.

  
  
  
  


Sirius was the last of his name but that would only be a very small part of his legacy. The rest of it would be made up of the first person to escape Azkaban on his own, being wrongfully accused of murder and his membership in the Order of the Phoenix. For some his legacy would also include best friend or godfather or bully. His legacy was a diverse one, just like the man who left it behind.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this was fun to write. Feel free to tell me your thoughts on it by leaving a comment. Title is from The World Was Wide Enough - Hamilton the musical.


End file.
